[ale] Any Thoughts on Fedora 12?

[Brian Pitts]

On 11/28/2009 07:42 PM, Marc Ferguson wrote:
> Hey Folks,
> 
> I'm a big-time Fedora user and I wanted to know if anyone has played
> with Fedora 12, natively? I'm going to wait about another week or so
> before I upgrade. Also; I've done the netboot install lately, but I see
> that I can do a YUM upgrade option. Does anyone recommend that?  Thanks.

Frankly, the only difference I've noticed in 12 is that network manager
has gotten some more functionality and polish.

I think there are two supported upgrade methods:

i) Upgrade by booting the dvd. Anaconda should recognize your existing
installation and offer to upgrade it.
ii) Upgrade using the 'preupgrade' tool [0]. THis downloads all the rpms
you need while you're still using your system, then reboots into Anaconda.

There's also the possibility of upgrading using yum, but it's not
recommended. [1]

I tried to upgrade from 11 to 12 using the DVD. I have two major complaints.

1) I expected Anaconda to give me the option of adding other
repositories. It never did. This meant any software I had installed
which wasn't included on the dvd couldn't be upgraded from it.

2) If the upgrade process fails, fixing it is pretty painful.

a) THere's an rpm named fedora-release that tells fedora what version it
is. If the upgrade fails after you've installed the updated version of
it, when you try to restart the upgrade via rebooting Anaconda refuses
to start in upgrade mode. Instead, it only present options for
installing a fresh system. The solution is to pass it the 'upgradeany'
option through the kernel boot options.

b) The way Anaconda seems to work is that all the Fedora 12 rpms are
installed, then all the Fedora 11 rpms are removed. This means that if
the upgrade fails you'll have both installed. Restarting the upgrade
won't cause it to remove the Fedora 11 packages that had their updated
versions installed before the failure.

c) If you have two versions of fedora-release installed, yum seems to
select repositories for the older one.

d) 'yum upgrade --obseletes --skip-broken' is really, really dumb
compared to apt-get or aptitude. If your system is in an inconsistent
state, prepare to spend a lot of time manually fixing it. rpm and
package-cleanup are your friends.

[0] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/PreUpgrade
[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/YumUpgradeFaq

-- 
All the best,
Brian Pitts